The Perceived Structure Of Social Attitudes And Personality : A Multidimensional Scaling Approach

This study examined the relationships between attitudes inferred from behavior and attitudes implied by item content. 60 subjects judged the similarity between all possible pairs of 18 attitude items and 6 person descriptions designed to reflect three hypothesized dimensions of authoritarian ideology. These interstimulus similarity judgments were subjected t o a multidimensional scaling analysis. Results supported the hypotheses that (a) subsets of attitude statements reflecting hypothesized facets of authoritarian ideology of Superstition, Authoritarian Rejection, and Power and Toughness would be per-ceived as representing independent dimensions; and (b) both people and attitude items can be represented cogently by points in a common multidimensional space.